


The Mouths of Babes

by nagi_schwarz



Series: Comment Fic 2017 [48]
Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Gen, Kid Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-15
Updated: 2017-05-15
Packaged: 2018-11-01 00:09:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10910271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagi_schwarz/pseuds/nagi_schwarz
Summary: Written for the fic_promptly prompts:SG1, Daniel/Sha're, what if they had a child during the year Daniel stayed on Abydos?Stargate SG-1, Jack/Sara, opacityStargate SG-1, any female character, televisionDaniel had a child. Jack tries to help him, but Jack alone isn't enough.





	1. Chapter 1

Jack stood in the doorway, watching Daniel standing in front of the fireplace, Sharif tucked into his arms. The kid was asleep, his head on Daniel’s shoulder, sucking his thumb. Daniel was staring into the empty fireplace, expression utterly blank. He’d basically checked out. His world had been turned upside down - his past reared its ugly head, his wife was kidnapped by evil aliens, his family shattered as he was forcefully dragged back to a world that had ridiculed and marginalized him.  
  
“We’ll do everything we can to get her back,” Jack said quietly. Losing his son had almost broken him. He wasn’t sure what he’d have done if he had Charlie still but lost Sarah.  
  
Daniel buried his face in his son’s hair and sucked in a hitching breath. He was crying.  
  
Jack couldn’t guarantee that they’d get Sha’re back. Everyone had assumed that destroying Ra was the end of the threat, that he was the last of his race, but they were wrong. There were more out there, just as technologically advanced, and just as hell-bent on destruction.  
  
Daniel sank to his knees sobbing, and Sharif came awake at the jolt. He stirred, opened his eyes. Heard his father’s crying and started to wail. Not in English. Dammit.  
  
Jack darted in, plucked Sharif from Daniel’s arms and started bouncing him, making soothing nonsense noises.  
  
“Jackson,” Jack said, “you need to get it together. You need -”  
  
Daniel sobbed harder. Sharif cried louder. It had been so long since Jack had handled a small child. He’d dealt with crying children besides his own, dealt with crying children who didn’t speak English, but that was usually in the battlefield, usually because their parents were gone.   
  
Jack hustled Sharif into the kitchen and dug in his everything drawer, came up with a little penlight. Flicked it on. Sharif’s gaze fixed on it, and he reached for it, his cries subsiding to breathless hiccups. Jack let him hold it, showed him how to flick it on and off.  
  
Sharif sniffled, thumbing the switch on the penlight.  
  
In the other room, Daniel was still crying.  
  
Jack took a deep breath and scooped the phone off the wall, dialed a number he never thought he’d call.  
  
The woman who answered sounded calm, cheery. “Hello?”  
  
“Sara, it’s Jack. I - I need your help.”


	2. Chapter 2

When Sara showed up at Jack's house in the middle of the night, after his call out of the blue and plea for help, she didn't know what to expect. She was a nurse and he was a soldier. Did he need medical assistance? Or was he finally going to admit that he needed to talk about Charlie, and the only person he could really do that with was her?  
  
He opened the door right before she could ring the doorbell in that uncanny Jack O'Neill way of his -  
  
And he was holding a child in his arms. A boy, dark-skinned and dark-haired, wearing strange clothes. The boy was sleeping, had obviously been crying.   
  
Sara stared. Ever since that day, since that fatal gunshot, Jack had avoided children. Where he'd always interacted with them before - played with them, made funny faces for them, gave them high fives - now he couldn't even look at him. But he held that child as naturally as he'd held Charlie at the same age. The boy was eighteen months, two at the most.  
  
Jack beckoned her in.  
  
"What's going on? Are you babysitting?" Sara whispered. If someone had asked Jack to babysit and he'd said yes, she could imagine how he might have panicked at being in charge of a child's safety.  
  
Jack held the boy out. "His name is Sharif. He doesn't speak very good English. Can you watch him? While I handle things."  
  
"What things?"  
  
Jack's gaze took on that opacity Sara had always hated. "It's - classified."  
  
Sara accepted the boy, tucked him against her, one hand under his bottom to support him. He stirred briefly, then tucked his face against her shoulder and kept on breathing deeply. "Then why did you call me?"  
  
"Because I can trust you - and I know you're good with kids."  
  
Sara opened her mouth to tell Jack he, too, was good with kids, but he'd already turned away, headed to the kitchen. He emerged a moment later, supporting a man wearing clothes similar to the boy's, only the man was caucasian, had brown hair and glasses. He was only half awake. He, too, had been crying. Jack shuffled him down the hall to the guest room.  
  
The boy's father, then.  
  
No sign of a mother. And that was why Jack had needed help.  
  
Sara gazed down at the boy, with his soft, baby-fine hair, his fine features. His mother must have been beautiful. She rocked him, hummed an old tune, one she hadn't used since -   
  
Since Charlie was the same age. She paced the living room - still with the hockey trophies and Simpsons videos on the shelves - and hummed gently.  
  
When Jack finally returned, he sank down on the couch and buried his face in his hands. "Jack?"  
  
"I just need a moment, then I'll put the kid to bed."  
  
"I can do it, if you like."  
  
Jack lifted his head. "You're the best."  
  
"Can you tell me what happened?"  
  
"It's classified."  
  
Sara sank down next to him. "He's a little boy. He'll want to know."  
  
"Oh, he has clearance."  
  
Sara blinked. The boy stirred and shifted. She smoothed a hand over his hair, hushed him.  
  
Jack gazed at her, and she knew he was remembering how she'd done the same for their son. "Would you be willing to help? Longterm. With him. I know you still have work at the hospital, but -"  
  
"Where's his mother?"  
  
"That's classified, too."  
  
That she wasn't here was pretty much all Sara needed to know. "Anything for you, Jack."  
  
"Then I need to make a call, and there are some papers you're going to have to sign."  
  
"Like I said, anything for you."


	3. Chapter 3

Sara had never been a believer in using television as a babysitter, but Sharif was fascinated by it. His favorite toy was still the little flashlight Jack had given him that first night - he could spend hours flicking it on and off, eyes wide with delight, only drawn away from his fascination for it by his need for food or a diaper change.  
  
So when Sara needed to head into the kitchen to fix a meal, she’d put Sharif in a playpen facing Jack’s television - playing whatever old cartoons she could scrounge up, some Care Bears she’d found in an old box of Charlie’s things - and whip up some food. Jack kept strange hours at the Mountain, as did Daniel. More often than not, Jack came home in the small hours of the night, supporting a half-awake Daniel with him, Daniel who was protesting and laden down with reports and scrolls and artefacts and books.  
  
Both of them would peek in at Sharif, and then Jack would chivvy Daniel off to bed, and Jack would check in with Sara before he went to sleep.  
  
Only once all of Sara’s boys were asleep did she dare to take herself home. Once Sara had been read into the program, she’d been given a job on-base as a nurse, and since NORAD was right upstairs, there was an on-base daycare for Sharif to go to.  
  
Her life had turned upside down two months ago, with that late-night phone call from Jack, out of the blue, asking her for help. Daniel was still a wreck. He was obsessed with finding his wife, rescuing her. He researched, he trained hard to go through the gate, and he sometimes remembered to eat and sleep.  
  
After that first few weeks, Daniel managed to wade out of the worst depths of his grief and build a new routine with Sharif - waking him in the morning, bathing him and changing him, feeding him breakfast, dropping him off at daycare, and then heading to work. He’d fetch Sharif for a lunch break if he was around for it, but inevitably he ended up working late, so Sara and Sharif had dinner together, just the two of them.  
  
Sara had made friends with Janet, the CMO, and Sam Carter, Jack’s 2IC, and sometimes the ladies would come over and cook and share a meal while Jack was out with Daniel and Teal’c, but most evenings it was just Sara and Sharif. He was clapping his hands and giggling at the Care Bears’ antics while Sara fixed up an easy meal - rice, chicken, a root vegetable similar to something Sha’re had cooked on Abydos, or so Daniel said.  
  
Sara had gone through storage and dug out the boxes and boxes of Charlie’s things she hadn’t bothered to throw away at first, like baby clothes, and that she couldn’t bear to throw away after he died. The first time Jack came home and saw Sharif wearing a tiny Mets jersey he’d looked - shocked. Betrayed. And then he’d cast Sara a worried look, and she’d hurried to assure him that no, she wasn’t using Sharif as a substitute for Charlie, but she’d had the clothes, and why not put them to good use.  
  
Sara poked her head out of the kitchen - yep, Sharif was still in his playpen - and then ducked back into the kitchen to give the rice a stir. She had just stuck her wooden spoon in the pot when a voice cut through the din from the television.  
  
“Mama?”  
  
Sara dropped the spoon, her heart stopping. No one had called her that, not since -  
  
She dashed into the living room. Sharif was standing at the edge of his playpen, arms up, demanding to be held. Sara swallowed down the lump in her throat and picked him up.  
  
She turned off the television and carried him back into the kitchen. She could cook one-handed. She could do so many things one-handed. It was part of being a mother.  
  
“I’m Sara,” she said, pointing to herself. She pointed to the drawing on the refrigerator of Sha’re. Jack had gotten a young, artistically-inclined captain on base to draw a portrait of Sha’re. Jack had described her as best as he could, from memory, and Captain Lorne had scribbled away. Apparently between Jack’s memory and Lorne’s steady hand, the likeness was true enough, because Daniel had burst into tears when Jack presented it to him.  
  
“That’s Mama. Mama is Sha’re. I’m Sara. Papa is Daniel.”  
  
Sharif said his father’s name with a curious accent, _Dan’yel._  
  
Sara took Sharif’s little hand in her own, pressed it to her heart. “Sara.” Then she used his little hand to point to the picture of Sha’re. “Mama.”  
  
But Sharif tugged on her nose impatiently and said, “Mama.”  
  
Sara shook her head, avoided his next attempt at grabbing her nose, but he said, “Mama, mama _you_.”  
  
And Sara couldn’t help it - she started to cry.  
  
Because she was crying, Sharif started to cry - he was very sensitive to the emotions of the people around him. Sara apologized between sobs, put him back in his playpen, turned the cartoon back on, and fled to the spare bedroom (not Jack’s room, not Daniel’s room, not Sharif’s room) to try to pull herself together.  
  
Only Sharif was still wailing and screaming, _Mama! Mama!_ and she smelled something burning so she had to rush back into the kitchen, and then the fire alarm went off and she had to open all the doors and windows and fan smoke away from the alarm with a dishtowel, so naturally Jack came storming into the house with,   
  
“What the hell is going on here?”  
  
Daniel was right on his heels, scooped Sharif out of the playpen and silenced the television. He and Jack crowded in the kitchen doorway.  
  
“Sara,” Jack began, tone sharp, but then he got a look at her - she had no idea what she looked like, except probably awful - and he said, “Hey, are you all right?”  
  
Sharif’s wails had subsided to little hiccuping sobs once he was in Daniel’s arms, but he strained toward Sara. “Mama?”  
  
“I tried to tell him I’m not his mama,” Sara said. “Pointed to the picture of Sha’re like we’re supposed to, but -”  
  
Daniel sighed, pushed his glasses up his nose. “He knows Sha’re is his mother. But you’re the woman of the house, and you care for him, and - he can call you Mama if he wants to.”  
  
“If you don’t mind,” Jack added.  
  
Sharif wriggled in Daniel’s arms. “Mama?”  
  
Sara reached out, accepted him into her embrace, and he snuggled against her, burying his face in her neck and hiccupping wetly. “I’m sorry, baby boy,” she whispered. “Mama’s here.”  
  
She hadn’t said those words since -  
  
Since -  
  
She couldn’t help it. She started to cry again, silent tears, and held Sharif tighter. Jack reached out and pulled her into his arms, holding her, just being there, and then Daniel was there as well supporting her, and maybe it would be all right.  
  
Sara knew it would be all right, three days later, when Jack dug around in his closet and came up with Charlie’s old favorite baseball and sat down on the floor with Sharif, rolled it toward him, showed him how to roll it back.


End file.
